From the Magazine

Venice Is Buzzing

Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli’s collection of modern and contemporary art was built with the same passionate independence that informs their fashion empire. So the anticipation of seeing it at the Prada Foundation’s new home—an 18th-century palazzo on the Grand Canal—has reached a crescendo. In Venice, Ingrid Sischy views an exclusive pre-exhibition installation, created for V.F. and photographed by Sam Taylor-Wood, that is a triumph of logistics, aesthetics, and creativity.

I first entered Miuccia Prada’s world almost 20 years ago, when I was profiling her for The New Yorker. That was right at the beginning of her stupendous trajectory as a fashion designer; as an ex-Communist and a feminist, she was just getting over the shudders that had come with joining the family business—the house of Prada dates back to 1913—and then discovering that she had a real passion for the work. (After the story we became pals.) Back then, she was a kind of avant-garde fashion secret, and the business, which had been in the doldrums until she took over, was small. Now she is the Miuccia Prada, still fiercely independent and rebellious, but also a trendsetting icon and head of an empire that’s been valued at $9.5 billion should the company go public. She continues to live in the relatively modest Milanese family building where she grew up. The biggest change since her childhood is that the place now has some killer art—for example, a gridded multicolored painting by Gerhard Richter, works by Italian art heroes such as Lucio Fontana and Alighiero Boetti, and an “Escape Vehicle,” an artified, customized, scaled-down Airstream-like trailer that one can sleep in, by the American artist Andrea Zittel.

Photos: Explore Prada’s most striking spaces. But those objects are a drop in the bucket compared with what she and Patrizio Bertelli—her equally independent and rebellious husband, who heads Prada’s business side—have amassed for both the Prada Foundation and their personal collection, most of which has never been seen publicly and which ranks as one of the world’s most fascinating collections of modern and contemporary art. A reflection of Prada’s and Bertelli’s very different sensibilities, it has a personal, experimental quality that is missing from many of today’s big-league collections, which just go for the “in” names. The open, more eclectic approach is in keeping with Miuccia’s personality, the key to which was handed to me by her late mother, Luisa, years ago. She recalled giving this advice to a suitor of her spirited youngest daughter, then about 17: “Don’t clip her wings.” The beau didn’t listen, and Miuccia, who has always reminded me of an exotic bird, dashing and darting into the world, flew the coop. That don’t-cage-me spirit is in the DNA of her art collection.

So, when I was talking to Germano Celant, the Prada Foundation’s eminent director, and he told me that it would be impossible to pull off the scoop in Venice that Miuccia and Patrizio had offered Vanity Fair, I couldn’t wait to see what would happen next. The background: in conjunction with the Venice Biennale, opening this June, the Prada Foundation is creating an art bonanza of its own at its new home on the Grand Canal. The site is Ca’ Corner della Regina, a nearly 65,000-square-foot 18th-century palazzo named after Caterina Corner, a local heroine who was crowned the Queen of Cyprus in 1472, at the age of 17; only a few months later, her husband, King James II, died, and Caterina eventually gave her kingdom to the people of Venice. So that Vanity Fair would have a few things to see and photograph in time to include them in this issue as an exclusive preview of the coming exhibition, Prada and Bertelli decided to create a temporary installation, a sort of mini-dress rehearsal for the real thing. And that’s what had director Celant shaking his head, because it’s no simple matter to move around the kind of art the couple had in mind—works such as Anish Kapoor’s Void Field (1989), a monumental, multi-part sandstone sculpture weighing in at 35 tons, give or take; Louise Bourgeois’s Cell (Clothes) (1996), a walk-in installation the size of a small room that meditates on exquisitely evocative, even painful memories via the medium of cut-up and otherwise altered clothes and bulbous, human-like figures made of fabric; and Pino Pascali’s Confluenze (1967), a kind of sculpted river in zinced aluminum containers holding water and aniline, a chemical that turns that water an electric shade of blue.

These are not pieces made for easy schlepping. And beyond the logistics of getting them to Venice from the gigantic Prada Foundation art warehouse, in Milan—you can’t just toss this stuff into the back of a van (that aniline I mentioned is volatile when pure, its vapor can be toxic, and it smells like rotten fish)—there was the added complication that the foundation had only recently gotten the keys to Ca’ Corner della Regina. (It was previously used for archival storage by the Biennale.) Since the palazzo is under the guardianship of a cultural ministry, anything that is done to it has to be approved by Italian officials, not always an easy task historically. To be sure, the palazzo is a gem, replete with ornamental details and rich materials, including red marble benches from Verona, yellow Lessinia stone, limestone steps from Istria, walnut doors, Venetian terrazzo floors, terra-cotta tiles, and wood-beamed ceilings. But it is currently undergoing an exacting restoration, under the auspices of a Venetian bureau that protects architectural heritage and funded by the rent Prada is paying. (In exchange, the foundation gets to occupy the palazzo for the next 6 to 12 years.) Unfortunately, the work would be nowhere near done by the deadline for our photo shoot. When I say “nowhere near done” I mean: crumbling ceilings in certain spaces, and unstable walls; plus floors, windows, doors, and a cycle of frescoes about Caterina’s life all needing careful, laborious restoration. No wonder Celant said it was crazy to think of setting up a preview two months before the actual installation. But long story short: a couple of weeks later, there we were at the palazzo, Prada and Celant included, with the Kapoor, Bourgeois, and Pascali in place. Mission accomplished, without compromising the artworks or the restoration. Hello, Italy. Hello, Miuccia and Patrizio. She was wearing Prada shoes that were half brogues, half espadrilles: brown leather lace-ups atop high orange-and-white platform soles made out of synthetics and rope; the effect was as if she herself were up on scaffolding. “We like challenges,” she told me with a laugh, flipping a wild, striped, and colored fur stole she had made for herself, one similar to those she showed for her spring 2011 “Carmen Miranda” collection. Prada and Bertelli have become legendary in the fashion and art worlds for making their own rules. But they are also believers in careful study; thus, when they decided in the early 1990s to focus on modern and contemporary art as collectors, and to create a foundation that would support outside-the-box ideas, theirs was a serious commitment. The Prada Foundation has a history of commissioning ambitious projects for exhibition (which then become part of the foundation’s collection), such as Marc Quinn’s Garden (2000), a spectacularly lush “eternal” garden made up of nearly 100 species of fresh plants and flowers arranged inside a 10-foot-high, 42-foot-long terrarium that was filled with 25,000 liters of liquid silicone and kept at minus 20 degrees Celsius, so that the flora will remain frozen forever. When it comes to materials and logistics, says Prada, “we are attracted to the nightmares.” People have been salivating to see what she and Bertelli own—between their personal collection and the foundation’s there are some 700 works and counting, a mix of big and lesser names and all kinds of surprises. So, the Venice show—which includes pieces from their personal collection and others on loan from a number of institutions they’ve been collaborating with, such as the Arab Museum of Modern Art, in Qatar—has been generating a lot of buzz. For a long time Prada wanted to keep her art life separate from her fashion life; she didn’t want to be seen as cannibalizing art in her work, or using it as a status symbol—something that happens all too often in fashion and elsewhere. But her track record speaks for itself. And, naturally, she would not be satisfied with a nice, polite show with all the ends neatly tied together. “Better to make mistakes than being totally correct. We want to do something alive,” says Prada. “The whole idea was to try and do something that could help produce new ideas in the future. However much we criticize art for being commercial, it is still a place for freedom and thinking and creativity.”

New ideas don’t come along that often, but the exhibition provides a kind of petri-dish environment in which they can cook. Or think of it as a jam session, with artworks riffing on one another thanks to evocative or provocative juxtapositions—Prada likes surprising couplings and unexpected combinations in her fashion as well as her art. For instance, one room will offer a blind-date rendezvous between the uncompromisingly edgy films of Todd Solondz and the equally out-there, anguished, deeply personal videos of Nathalie Djurberg, as cut together by the film editor Marco Giusti. Fait d’Hiver (1988), Jeff Koons’s first porcelain sculpture of his now ex-wife, the notorious former porn star La Cicciolina, created when he was first falling for her—hard—will share a space with a collection of 18th-century Meissen porcelain, borrowed from the State Hermitage Museum, in St. Petersburg, Russia. (Quite a couple.) And for an extra wry touch, the architect Rem Koolhaas has designed the display tables. Elsewhere, works by artists such as Damien Hirst, Piero Manzoni, Bruce Nauman, Enrico Castellani, Donald Judd, Tom Friedman, Salvatore Scarpitta, and Walter De Maria will speak to one another across rooms and decades, inviting debate and polemic. Furthermore, in order to protect the palazzo, as not all the rooms will be completely restored, in some cases visitors will be voyeurs, forced to look in on the artwork through doorways.

OMA, Koolhaas’s firm, which has worked with Prada for years designing buildings and conceptualizing projects, has created a special installation for the Venice show which highlights the architect’s latest work for Prada: a permanent exhibition space for the foundation, to be located in the industrial section of Milan, in an area known inside the company as “Prada Village.” These days, the historic complex of warehouses—formerly a distillery—is mostly empty, apart from a few buildings containing the Prada archives and the vast storage space where all of the art is kept. What Koolhaas plans is a thoughtful, exciting synthesis of conservation and unadulterated newness. A model of the Milan exhibition space that OMA created for the show in Venice lights the way toward the Prada Foundation’s future, but it also has elements that remind me of an old European dollhouse—especially the teeny-tiny copies of the private collection’s artworks, made in China by artisans who normally produce fakes. (Go to the pros to get something done right.) Picture as well tiny collectors, curators, and dealers, riveted.